Midnight, Texas is a brand new supernatural drama series from NBC. Heavily advertised at SDCC (I’m pretty certain I saw the trailer for it about 20 times), the show is based on the series of books of the same name by Charlaine Harris set in a town that attracts various mystical waifs and strays, including witches, were-people, vampires…and a pair of fallen angels.

Joe and Chuy, played by Jason Lewis and Bernardo Saracino, were introduced on the show as a gay married couple, who also happened to be fallen divine beings.

But now, in the series’ fourth episode when the pair finally kiss, the usual kind of voices have started speaking up decrying the inclusion of not just homosexuals, but ones that are in some way Christian.

Lindsay Kornick of Newsbusters, a site that boasts the tagline “Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias”, decided to go on a wee little rant about how disturbed she is by the idea of gay angels:

“It’s bad enough I can’t go one show without seeing a gay couple wedged into the plot anymore (we are by far past thefour percent representation the LGBT community really makes up), but now they’re affecting symbols of a decidedly non-homosexual religion.

The sad part of this is not how blatant it is but how much it is no longer a surprise.

We get it, your show can’t be hip unless it features a minimum of two gay characters. You could at least have the decency to keep my religion out of it.

Until then, you’ll be hearing back from me when, not if, we get transsexual angels.”

But the fact is that gay people can be religious, too, and Christian to boot. No religion can really be described as “non-homosexual”; and angels are not an entirely Christian motif. Many religions around the world contain beings analogous and often described as looking similar to contemporary imagery.

Kornick also does seem to not fully realise that the dated statistic of around 4% of people in the US identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender is roughly equivalent to the entire population of New Jersey, so the number of LGBT characters represented on the screen is still far below the the capability of showing the vast breadth of diversity therein. Plus, that 4% also doesn’t account for LGBTQ+ people who cannot yet come out of the closet for one reason or another.

But you know what, I’m sure the show will do well regardless of her views. Harris was also the writer of the book series that became hugely popular and equally filled with queer supernatural beings show True Blood, so if Midnight, Texas can capitalise on that popularity, too, I’m sure it’ll do just fine.

Joe Glass has been contributing to Bleeding Cool for about four years. He's been a roaming reporter at shows like SDCC and NYCC, and also has a keen LGBTQ focus, with his occasional LGBTQ focus articles, Tales from the Four Color Closet. He is also now Bleeding Cool's Senior Mutant Correspondent thanks to his obsession with Marvel's merry mutants.

Joe is also a comics creator, writer of LGBTQ superhero team series, The Pride, the first issue of which was one of the Top 25 ComiXology Submit Titles of 2014. He is also a co-writer on Stiffs, a horror comedy series set in South Wales about call centre workers who hunt the undead by night. One happens to be a monkey. Just because.